


like a rip current: slender and smooth

by bellafarallones



Category: The Arcana (Visual Novel)
Genre: Alcohol, Consensual Violence, Gen, asra is nice in a sarcastic way, spectrophotometry, valdemar angst, valdemar decides to ask julian for advice and then actually follow through on what he says
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-16
Updated: 2020-06-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:27:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24746053
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellafarallones/pseuds/bellafarallones
Summary: Their skin hadn’t always been green. Hundreds of years ago now, their jaw had ached as their original human teeth rotted and fell away and were replaced with something more suitable for tearing flesh. Their fingernails, once pink keratin, were so hard and metallic now that running them across concrete produced sparks."Kill me," said Valdemar.
Comments: 3
Kudos: 21





	like a rip current: slender and smooth

Especially in those days, Dr. Julian Devorak knew enough people around Vesuvia that if he didn’t see one of his friends at the bar, it was worth checking the back booths in the Rowdy Raven for people he knew. 

Today he regretted checking. Someone with bandages over their hair was sitting alone at a table for four, despite the rest of the place being packed. Someone with red eyes and a surgical mask over their unnaturally sharp teeth. Julian’s boss. Quaestor Valdemar. 

He froze when their gaze flickered over him. They were sitting in front of a glass of something clear that probably wasn’t water. “069,” they said. “Doctor Devorak.”

“That’s my name,” said Julian nervously.

“Will you join me? I want to pick your brain.”

“Um.”

“Not literally,” they added hurriedly, remembering that the last time he’d seen them they were wrist-deep in a plague victim’s skull. 

“Sure?” Julian shifted back from one foot to another.

Valdemar dug in their pocket and dropped a few gold coins on the table. “Buy yourself a drink and come back..”

Julian slid off through the crowd, though they could follow his progress by his unusual height. He came back with a whole bottle of rum. “You’re throwing a lot of money around tonight, Valdemar.”

They seemed to be genuinely surprised. “What? You want more?” Another two handfuls of gold coins clinked onto the table.

“...how much do you get paid?”

“Apparently more than you do.” They pulled down their surgical mask to drink, revealing two rows of shark-teeth. “I don’t really think about it.” Then they looked more closely about Julian. “You’re already intoxicated.”

“Yes. What are  _ you  _ drinking?”

Valdemar looked down into their glass. “This is grain alcohol.”

“So you’re in no position to lecture me about intoxication.”

“When you’re as old as I am you build up a tolerance.”

“What? You’re not that much older than me. Are you?” Julian leaned forward. Their eyes revealed nothing of their age, and their skin was smooth, jaundiced, and waxy. 

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” said Valdemar, and flashed Julian a sharp-toothed smile as they took another sip.

Julian shivered. “You said you wanted to ask me something.”

“Yes. You’ve been in situations you didn’t want to be in before, correct?”

“Hasn’t everyone?”

Valdemar spread their gloved hands flat on the table. “Allow me to be forward. Say you made a deal with someone in the past, and now they’re expecting you to do things you don’t want to do, bad things, even though you’re no longer getting anything out of it. What would you do?”

“Is this about Lucio?”

“You really think Lucio could force me to do anything I didn’t want to do? Please.”

“Good point. Well, if it was me I’d probably skip town. Change my name and start over somewhere else.”

“If they’d find you anywhere?”

“Kill them.”

Valdemar leaned back against the booth seat and crossed their arms across their chest. 

“Come on, don’t tell me this person is unkillable. Especially not for you. Earlier today I watched you extract a man’s beating heart one-handed.”

“I had to use my other hand to cover his mouth,” said Valdemar. “He was being irritating.” They reached across the table and pointedly refilled Julian’s glass of rum. “Drink.”

He brought it obediently to his lips. Only when he was drunk enough to see two Valdemars in front of him did he speak again. “I’ve never seen you around here before. Why tonight?”

“I used to enjoy going out. Seeing people. This was a long time ago, of course. I wondered if I still did.”

“And do you?”

“You’re alright.”

“How old are you?”

“I don’t think you’ll remember this in the morning,” said Valdemar quietly.

“Probably not.”

“In that case, I may as well be honest. I cut my teeth treating ague in the marshes of Campagna before the Visigoths sacked Rome.”

Julian counted on his fingers. “That was… nine hundred years ago.”

“You can see how there is little of life left for me to enjoy.”

Julian nodded. “Sometimes I feel that way too.”

“What are you  _ talking  _ about? You’re young, you’re beautiful, people like you. People  _ love  _ you.”

“I’m a terrible person. I’ve hurt everyone I love.”

“Let me tell you a secret, Julian.” Valdemar leaned close over the table, and Julian, numb, leaned to meet them. “When I’m cutting into someone is the only time I feel alive. I’ve watched so many people die in my life that life means nothing to me.  _ You  _ have depression.”

“So who the hell is making you do anything? Who can’t you escape?”

“The being I made a deal with… I cannot kill him. Physical distance means nothing.”

Julian leaned back. “So it’s a magic thing.”

“Yes.”

“Asra knows about stuff like that. Not me.”

“But if you were me, knowing what you know, what would you do?”

Julian blinked. “I’d kill myself.”

Valdemar thought about death. Immortality had seemed like a reward, especially at first, but there wasn’t anything wrong with death. They had even met Death, the incarnation of change, and they knew change best of all. 

Their skin hadn’t always been green. Hundreds of years ago now, their jaw had ached as their original human teeth rotted and fell away and were replaced with something more suitable for tearing flesh. Their fingernails, once pink keratin, were so hard and metallic now that running them across concrete produced sparks. 

“Tell me more,” said Valdemar.

“Well, when I think about it, I don’t kill myself because,” and here Julian counted the reasons on his fingers, “the people I love would miss me. I have things to look forward to. And I can help people.”

“But for me, death is the logical choice.” Valdemar reached into their jacket with steady hands and pulled out a scalpel, which they laid on the table with the handle facing Julian. “Do it. Kill me.”

“Do you carry that around with you all the time?” said Julian. 

“Unimportant.”

Julian picked up the scalpel. It was very sharp. Very, very sharp. “I can’t stab you in here.”

“We’ll go outside, then.” Valdemar gently took Julian’s other hand, the one not holding the scalpel, and led him through the crowd and out into the street, leaving their empty bottles behind on the table. The remnants of that afternoon’s rain dripped onto the street from the gutter. 

They pulled him into the alley, out of the light of the lamps, where night truly settled and he could only see their red eyes in the gloom. 

“Do it,” they murmured. They pulled his hand by the wrist until the blade of the scalpel was just touching their throat. This close they could smell the alcohol on his breath and the sweat on his skin: his shirt-collar was slicked to his chest with it. “Nobody will miss me.”

Julian’s hand was shaking. He’d trained as a doctor to help people, repeated for years  _ do no harm,  _ but then again, Valdemar hadn’t blinked all evening. They weren’t a person. 

He thought of Valdemar’s voice ricocheting through the dungeon hallways as they screamed at some unfortunate doctor, furious at the speed of progress or the lack of suitable test subjects. He was terrified of them.

He thought of the drip, drip, drip of blood dribbling off the vivisection table onto the dungeon floor, the way Valdemar breathed out in a hiss when they made the first cut. He hated them. And now his legs were shaking but his hand was steady, and he drove the scalpel into their throat. 

\--

Julian was not at the palace when he came to the next morning, but the smell of herbs told him where he was immediately. “Asra?” he called. He was slumped in an armchair in the fortune-telling room of Asra’s magic shop.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” said Asra dryly, popping his head into the room.

Julian tried to stand up, but the unaccustomed weight in his pockets conspired with his hangover to keep him down. “What -” he plunged a hand in his pockets and came out with a handful of coins. Every pocket in his pants and jacket was full of gold. And his hands were stained with dried blood. 

“I think I did something awful last night,” said Julian, and looked up at Asra expectantly.

“Don’t look at me. One of the courtiers hauled you here dripping blood, and once I verified that you weren’t injured yourself I figured I’d just let you sleep.”

“Which one?”

“The one with the mask. Your boss.”

“ _ Valdemar? _ ” 

Asra shrugged.

“Ohh…” Julian buried his face in his hands, not caring that he was probably smearing blood all over his cheeks. He couldn’t see himself robbing anyone, and if Valdemar had caught him committing a crime, he’d be in the dungeons right now, not Asra’s house, but how else had he ended up with so much money?

“You must have been pretty upset,” said Asra. “You weren’t even trying to get me to fuck you.”

“Did I say what had happened? Did  _ they  _ say anything?” 

“No. What do you remember?

Julian rubbed his forehead. “I was at the Rowdy Raven. And I… found Valdemar there. And they gave me the money to buy a whole bottle of rum and told me to drink. I blacked out.”

“Always a good way to begin the evening.”

Julian looked down at his hands. Dried blood was crusted brown beneath his nails. “Do you think I should turn myself into the guards?”

“Of course not.”

“What if I murdered someone?”

Asra shrugged. “Why be punished if you can avoid it? Hey, if Valdemar gave you money for rum, maybe they gave you the rest of that money too. They could have gotten drunk and decided you were underpaid for all the valuable work you do.”

Julian hauled himself out of the chair, nudged aside a crystal ball and a stack of tarot cards, and emptied his pockets onto the table. Asra came over to examine the coins. Several featured a silhouette neither of them recognized: not Nadia, or Lucio, or even the previous Count or Countess.

“Either you robbed someone’s antique coin collection, or Valdemar still carries around hundred-year-old money,” said Asra. “Do you want to wash your hands?”

“Yeah,” said Julian. ‘Wait. Can you look at this blood and tell me whether it’s human?”

“Actually, that’s not a bad idea. I think I could,” said Asra. He pulled a small knife out of his pocket and took Julian’s hand in his, gently scraping dried blood out from under the nails and onto the tabletop next to the coins. Then he rummaged around in drawers until he found a tube-shaped instrument, a little wider than a finger. 

“Is that a spectrophotometer with glitter on it?” said Julian, still reeling a little from Asra’s warm hand holding his own steady.

“Certainly not.” Asra transferred the dried blood from the table into a little drawer in the tube, and held it up to the window. 

“It is! I can see the brand name! Did you buy this out of a scientific supply catalogue?”

“Well, that’s definitely blood of some kind,” said Asra, ignoring Julian’s question. “Not red paint or rust.”

Julian seized the spectrophotometer and looked through it himself. Atoms of particular types gave off particular energies, and the spectrophotometer separated these out into a visible spectrum. “Carbon?”

“Overwhelmingly so.” Asra raised his palms to the sky and spoke with obvious melodrama. “O mighty Arcana, tell me through your mysterious ways whether this is human blood.” Then he shuffled the tarot cards and allowed Julian to choose one.

“Death. Does that mean I killed someone?”

“No.” Asra suddenly gripped the edge of the table. “My magic is… telling me something. It’s definitely not human blood. Not animal blood either, though. Do you mind if I take a closer look at this?”

Julian shrugged. “Do you think I hurt someone?”

“I think anyone or anything with blood like this is beyond what you’re capable of hurting.”

\--

It took another few days for Julian to work up the courage to ask Valdemar what had happened.

“You stabbed me,” they said coldly, and then turned back to the semiconscious soon-to-be-corpse under their scalpel. “Ineffectually.”

**Author's Note:**

> i need to know where vesuvia is in their scientific revolution. in the 1800s people used spectrometers to figure out what the sun was made of and that's some magical shit right there


End file.
